massive DNS or connectivity problem May 26?

Not sure what is up but starting around 3:45 a.m. this morning, most but not all of the pages I tried to access at different sites came back with errors.

The best example was when I typed in:

www.google.com

In one case, I got back an error message from my web brower (Firefox 2.0.0.14) saying it could not connect to the site.

In the other case, I got back an error page from Verizon (my ISP at the moment) sadly informing me there was no such site and offering helpful (?) advice about what I might have meant to say.

Here is the URL. As you can see, www.google.com is indeed what I typed in and what it indeed thought did not exist.

http://wwwz.websearch.verizon.net/search?qo=www.google.com&rn=eLg2xDr0Wmy5PnK


Had problems getting to other sites as well. The problem seemed to clear up after a few minutes.

It was kind of uncanny. I wonder if something really big went wrong for a few minutes on the Internet.

It is 4 a.m. now and the problem(s) seem to have gone away.

New Google Talk chat widget added to web bling in sidebar of this blog

Google Talk has a new feature which is a little chat widget that can be added to web pages, weblogs, etc.

It uses the most basic standard web technology: HTML.  So it should work fine in any modern web browser.

I am trying it out to see if it helps my friends stay in touch with me.  If demented webvertisers start pointing 'bots and sub-minimum wage flunkies at it to try to sell me services/products, then I think I will unplug it.

In the meantime, it will be an interesting an hopefully useful experiment.

Lua 5.1.3 releassed January 2008

Lua 5.1.3 interpreter software for Lua 5.1 programming language was released January 2008. This version of the Lua 5.1 interpreter is a bug fix release.

There are some known bugs in Lua 5.1.3 at the moment.

my growing respect for Flash

Recently, the quality of the Flash mini-programs in some web pages has improved - dramatically.

The two things that annoyed me immensely about the use of Flash seem to have gone away:

1. Trying to do a website in Flash - guess what? You can't bookmark the pages.
2. Hangs and slowdowns caused by the Flash engine on some platforms.

Google and Blizzard have shown what cool things can be done with flash. Instead of trying to cram a web site into Flash - which it not a good idea, they craft a really nice component that is displayed in web pages.

Google does this with Google Maps, if the web browser does not have a suitable SVG renderer.

Blizzard has created very rich WoW Atlas and other handy things using Flash.

I have a little unease about how much power Flash gives programmers to bypass intentional, well thought-out restrictions of a web browser. This has caused some problems. I hope the creators of Flash are hyper-vigilant about this now.

In terms of what it can accomplish though, today I have seen that a person or team with good artistic and programming skills can produce amazing results. The evidence of this has appeared on the web during the past couple years.

I am won over that it is worth really delving into learning Flash development now.

I already know Javascript - so time to learn ActionScript programming!

knocked over utility posts in the area

My neighborhood has some weird people in it. So weird things happen here that I have not encountered anywhere else that I have lived in my life.

I will not bother to list them all but the list is now considerable.

The latest problem is that my Internet connection for my computer has been dropping frequently this week. As many as around 8 times yesterday.

Perhaps not coincidentally we have not one but two downed short, little utility posts along the main street through our neighborhood.

One of the posts is smashed off at ground level and completely missing. A conduit sticks right up out of the ground about 8 to 10 inches up in the air. No pieces of the post housing on the ground, so it must have been broken quite a while.

The other post is lying on its side. A bunch of insulated cables snake up from a hole in the ground to the post which is lying more than several inches away from where it had been installed.

A neighbor told me the latter one had been lying down like that for a couple of months.

I am pretty munch an indoor person. I like to read, study, listen to music - sometimes watch a show or DVD. You do not do those things outdoors.

I have experienced a growing number of nuisance problems ourdooors in recent years. I finally started getting vigilant after finding a mob of a dozen people I had never seen before sitting in my yard after dark two months ago.

After I caught these trespassers by surprise, I started looking around the neighborhood. I noticed more weird problems, like these downed/missing posts.

After a couple of failed attempts to report the problem with the posts, I finally got through to the right person at the phone company today. They are sending someone out to look at the problem and make necessary repairs.

I guess the lesson here is you have to be very alert to what is going on outside in your neighborhood. There are people around doing thing you can never imagine a person doing.

Some people do not respect your property or communal property.

If you never go outside at night and you do not take a close look at things by day then you can never get anything done about the damage they do.

I never saw going outside and checking my yard and my neighborhood as one of my chores before but now I do.

Hopefully, by getting all of these problems addressed - eventually the people responsible will stop, move away, or have a long overdue encounter with the law and be removed.

Intel announced 16 new processors

Intel has come out with a wave of new x86 processors - 16, in fact. Fifteen of them are optimized for use in servers. Features like larger cache help server performance out.

The second computer I ever bought was one of the very early x86 computer systems: the Zenith Z-100. Zenith/Heath introduced it in the early 1980s, just after the IBM PC came out.

I spent part of 1983 or 1984 at home on weekends/evenings doing a little x86 programming project for a coworker. It was a library of low-level graphics routines, written in x86 assembly language.

I spent a lot of time from 1986-2001 writing x86 assembly language, as well as debugging x86 written by myself and others that was written in C.

Back then, we did not have source-level, symbolic debuggers like we got in the mid-1990s. It was pretty primative in the 1980s.

I spent the last half of the 1980s doing embedded systems programming. Back then, you were happy if your C compiler generated correct code and did not crash. I had both things happen to me more than once - though it was rare then and rarer now.

I wrote all kinds of graphics and communications software in x86 assembly language. Even in the mid-1990s, I had to use my knowledge of the instruction set to debug faulty C++ code generation once or twice.

So even after I switched from coding in assembly language to writing code in C and C++, that earlier knowledge was still paying off.

Lucky for me, x86 architecture has wound up totally dominating the desktop computer marketplace. Windows, Macintosh, and Linux - they are all based on x86 now. No indication that will change for the rest of this decade.

Thanks to continual performance enhancements from Intel, they all run faster every year!

Veterans Administration gets vets records from DoD on paper

Heard an interesting news story on the radio yesterday, and repeated on news video at Yahoo News.

The US VA computers do not have access to the medical records of their patients that are on computers at the DoD.

I can see how there are inherent problems to be overcome.

Hospitals in the US have had a standard file format for medical records for decades called HL7.

Well, it is a start.

Post-it Easel

Saw a neat 3M commercial at the start of a Yahoo news video this morning.

3M has created something cool for creative types to use when brainstorming at meetings. Basically, it is a giant pad of huge Post-it sheets.

There is even a version you can stick the whole easel to the wall, completely eliminating the need for an easel.

As you fill each page, you can stick it on the wall of the conference room.

The item is a Post-it Easel.

I think it is a great idea.

US Patent Office innovates - yes, actually innovates

This sounds like an incident of actually doing something new with software, not innovation-as-another-word-for-copying that is practiced by some software companies.

In Open Call from Patent Office, the Washington Post reports that the patent office is opening up 250 patents to peer review from the public - rather than forcing over-worked patent examiners to do 100% of the legwork/research.

Sounds like a great idea. For sure it is an idea, not clinging to the status quo, which is refreshing.

I am sure that some companies, you know the type, will try to "game" the system. Hopefully, some checks/protections will be in place to keep that from happening.

The last thing we need is for some software company with tens of billions of dollars to apply their astroturfing techniques for deceiving the public and public servants with false information/responses about competitors patents, the way they pay people to send letters signed by fictitious people to magazines and politicians.

However, they have done that and it was found out - so ghost writing public opinion will probably get caught quicker and serve as an embarrassment, or prosecutable offense this time.

With so much money riding on patent decisions -- for instance, a federal jury ordered Microsoft last month to pay $1.52 billion for infringing two digital-music patents -- the program's designers acknowledge that the incentive to manipulate the system is immense.

The new approach used in this public trial will take advantage of web-based social programming that have proven useful in recent Web 2.0 applications like news, shopping, etc.

James Kim: 1971-2006 | CNET News.com

The body of James Kim, CNET Senior Editor, discovered in Pacific northwest:

The body of the 35-year-old Kim was discovered Wednesday in a rugged wilderness area in southern Oregon. He had set out across snow and ice with only tennis shoes to protect his feet. He had eaten little in the seven days since his car got stuck.

A lot of news and facilities supplied to the public by CNET are very cool.

So when I heard about the search for one of its editors gone missing in the wilderness after his family got stranded out in the woods, it caught my eye.

I was pretty sure the rescuers would find him. After all, they almost always do.

When I saw the headline in the banner of GameSpot this evening, I realized with a sudden lurch, this is one of those times the rescuers arrive too late.

Apparently, this guy was was quite a gadget fan. He probably had a hand in some of the things I enjoyed learning or doing in the past.

He is gone now. I just read his article about him, cited above. Ironically, I would never have gotten to know him, if he had not passed away before his time.

I really do appreciate the people who toil away at CNET, often virtually anonymously. Their passion brings us to a better future.

Sometimes even beyond theirs.